Here's a fun thread about love and the image of God.

When God created people, it's written that, "in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them." (Gen 1:27)

But like, what does that even mean?

In the Ancient Near East, "image of god" was a term...
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...used to describe a ruler or king.* This meant that when Moses penned the book of Genesis, he expected his readers to glean the sense of ruling and stewarding God's creation very clearly. This is also clearly seen in verse 28, which reads... (2/?)

* http://bibleproject.com/explore/image-god/

..."Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

God instructed Adam and Eve to rule and to govern the whole of the earth.

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... So how then should they rule? What did it mean for Adam and Eve to be truly human, as made in the 'Image of God?'

The way to be truly human was to follow the character of God Himself in the way they conducted themselves and interacted with each other. We see this...

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... in the instructions God would give to their descendants long after Adam and Eve decided to define goodness and rightness for themselves (Gen 3:1-13)

The Mosaic law truly highlights two things: Love for God, and Love for Neighbor. These are split...

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... throughout the 10 Commandments which God gave to Moses, with the first few outlining how to honor God, and the second outlining how to care for those around us. This theme exists through every portion of the Scriptures, and they consistently show the...

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...failure of humankind to live up to the divine Image in which we were created. This is most apparent in the book of Judges, where the shocking and disturbing chain of events ends with this chilling phrase, "Everyone did what was right in his own eyes." (21:25)

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This lack of love and support, and inability to live in a way that exemplifies the Image of God, demanded that there might be some human person who could fulfill that Image. But with a population so desperately incapable, who could ever hope to stack up?

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Only God Himself, having taken on human form, could salvage the wreck of mankind and live as the perfect Image of God. He also supported this outline of how to be truly human, when He summed up the most important commandment. I'll let His words speak for themselves:

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"The most important (commandment) is ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is...

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The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-31)

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The whole story of the Bible can be seen when we contrast the words of Jesus with our actions. When we truly hold the mirror to ourselves, it becomes painfully obvious how necessary it was for Jesus to intervene.

Praise be to God that He did.

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So here's the follow up. Can we ever truly live up to our status as the Image of God?

Of course not! That's the whole story of the Old Testament. We are painfully broken and incapable of good on our own. So what is the solution?

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It certainly isn't to seek to perfect our actions, and to do so much good that we start to look like God. That didn't work for Israel, and it cannot work for us. The Apostle Paul puts it this way:

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"Before the way of faith in Christ was available to us, we were placed under guard by the law. We were kept in protective custody, so to speak, until the way of faith was revealed. Let me put it another way..."

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"...The law was our guardian until Christ came; it protected us until we could be made right with God through faith. And now that the way of faith has come, we no longer need the law as our guardian... "

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For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. And all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on Christ, like putting on new clothes. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus."

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The Image of God is love. For us to look like God, we must love Him, and love each other. That is the point of it all. That is the fulfillment that we can never find on our own.

That is hope.

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This thread may have gone a little off track, but most tracks lead back to the Gospel anyway. I'm content.